


Crow's Cage

by whitachi



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 14:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitachi/pseuds/whitachi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Basch, imprisoned, sees his brother for the first time in years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crow's Cage

Basch was no good at keeping track of the days or even the hours when they'd have him up in the crow's cage. His usual cell was just as fully, damnably solitary, but at least there he had, over time, learned to watch for patterns. If he put his ear to the stone of the floor, he could hear the distant shuffling of the rest of the prisoners in some other part of the fortress. If the noise was great, that meant it was day; were it quiet, Basch could assume nightfall. Or perhaps it was all a clever trick his own mind played to soothe him, addled and mad in thirst, in hunger, and in things much worse. 

He had not been left to rot. This e'er surprised him, each time his cell would open, after weeks (or perhaps only days, or perhaps months, how was he to tell?) of nothing, nothing at all, to reveal to him an Imperial, there to throw him scraps of food and a skin of water, and perhaps to put a boot to his chin to honor the captain and kingslayer, Basch fon Ronsenberg (and in times he began to doubt himself, doubt his own innocence, doubt even that he had truly had a brother at allwhat were memories but another madness?). And in the times when it seemed no one would ever return, he found his own ways to sustain his life. Rats were fine enough; bats were better, with less thick fur to choke his dry throat and finer, lighter bones for him to keep for whatever purpose might occur to him later. Rocks in the walls could be scratched at and turned until he could find that faint trickle of waterbut that could only be relied upon in the months when the rains would roll up from Dalmasca (he could not remember the feel of those rains upon his face, he found, but at times as he half-slept he would swear himself in the middle of a Landis snow), and soak Nalbina enough to trickle down even to the hell of traitors. 

But time and again, the Imperials would come not with some taunting of subsistence, but to lift his weakened, filthy body away from his four walls to a new scenery, shackled standing in a cage barely wider than the span of his shoulders to hang in the heights of the underground. Basch had attempted to thank his captors for giving him a chance at fresher air, but his throat was useless from too long in silence (he had given up shouting after only days, and after long enough, speaking to himself only brought greater ghosts to haunt him than the quiet alone). 

The first time he was strung up in the cage, Basch knew that this would finally be the end of it; he had troubled them by refusing to die in other circumstances, so it was time to let him waste to a skeleton surrounded by bars. His remains would no doubt make a trophy for the Archadian Emperor, to hang above his murderer's throne. But in time short enough, he learned the cage was not a final punishmentbut rather a preparation for a visitor. 

Basch could, at least, be certain that it was truly his brother in the flesh standing just beyond arm's reach outside of the bars. The Noah that had haunted him within his cell wore no armor of the Empire, had not been shorn like a lamb until he seemed half a man. The brother in his hungered dreams had also never spoken. 

"You would not die for Landis, and you still will not die, even here?" his brother said to him as he reached out a hand to grasp one of the bars of Basch's cage. A sturdy enough shake would no doubt break the ancient and rusted iron of the chain, and Basch had only faint hope of lasting to the fall below. But Noah's hand was still. "Is it cowardice or simply stubborness that keeps you living, Basch?" 

Basch's ashen tongue moved over his cracked lips, and he triedhe truly _tried_ to give Noah an answer. He was too weak, too parched, to make more than a crackling sound. He let a wheeze pass his lips for sound, and shaped with them the word, 'water'. His brother took his hand away from the cage. 

"What?" Basch summoned what strength he had left to lift his head and meet Noah's eyes. It felt like the first time, so long it had been since the two had been close enough for a gaze. It was broken quickly though, when Noah took a step back and spoke a few words to one of his escort. Effort spent, Basch let his head drop, and his eyes close once more. 

"Drink," came his brother's voice, and he thought of when they had both been struck by fevers in their twelfth year. Noah had tended to him, seen that the cloth on his head was cool, and his throat never went dry, even when he himself was wracked by chills. "Drink, Basch," he said again, and Basch was startled to hear the words in the tones of a man, and not a boy. He opened his lips to the skin of water pressed to them, and drank until he almost ached from the satisfaction of it. 

They could speak, then, and there lay no satisfaction in that for either brother. 

In the times after that, Basch became able to predict when he would be brought to the cage, and Noah would be there to ask questions that he could not answer; shortly before each time, an Imperial would come to bring him a full draught of water. 


End file.
